Asia and Pacific Region Forum

If my website is in Chinese, do I submit the url to Google the same way as I would sumbit an English site? I did not find separate submission instructions for foreign language sites on Google.

Also, I have listed below a few other popular Chinese search engines. Are there any other major ones that I've missed? My site has both traditional and simplified Chinese, and I would like it to be searchable by people regardless of whether they're in China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, or elsewhere. Thanks.

I have not submitted any of my recent Chinese language sites to a search engine. If you have links to your sites then Google and the rest will find them on their own. Submitting isn't a necessity, and some people will advise against it.

Also, I have listed below a few other popular Chinese search engines. Are there any other major ones that I've missed?

Add Yisou to that list and you'll have all the worthwhile ones for mainland China. Maybe someone who knows the TW and HK markets could fill you in on the gaps there.

Thanks for the response. I suppose I don't fully understand how the search engine bots work. If the page is in Chinese, does the search engine need to send the "Chinese bot" instead of the "English bot" so that it can properly read the page? What will happen if an "English bot" goes to a Chinese language site? This is why I am wondering if there's a need to specify the language when submitting the site to a search engine.

If you're worried about the bots then the best advice is to make sure that you have clean, validating code [validator.w3.org]. Then as long as you have content in the target language the bots should have no difficulty with your content.

The bot speaks binary only. It doesn't undertand English or Chinese, it just collects what is on the page and hands it to the database. The database on;y speaks binary too. However it knows that when somebody asks for a particular set of 0s and 1s to serve them the URLs of web sites that contain the same string.

Over simplified, but basically Google doesn't care what language it is dealing with.

However, if you've got the right headers it knows to categorise your page as in Chinese and encoded with utf-8 (or Big 5 or whatever).

Don't submit sites to Google, just get a link from a site that is already in Google's database and Goglebot will find it.